Organizations with complex IT (information technology) environments face the issue of what changes to make to their environment in order to enhance their services, for example by correcting failures that have occurred, maintaining or improving performance and availability, or expanding capacity to serve more users.
When they contact their maintenance support service to address this issue, the maintenance service faces the challenge of providing resolutions that both minimize the risk of unavailability by minimizing the number of changes needed in the customer's environment and maximize the benefit of applying the resolution by increasing automation, while remaining cost-effective for both the customer and the maintenance service provider.
Existing solutions that enable maintenance support to provide resolutions to the customer are primarily directed at specific resolution niches. These approaches do not provide a holistic maintenance service approach involving multiple resolution types for a given problem, nor do they optimize across different resolutions.
Accordingly, there exists a need for an improved technique of comparing different possible resolutions in terms of their cost, benefit and risk, for both the customer and maintenance support.